


i'll still destroy you

by rillrill



Series: bad ones [2]
Category: Succession (TV 2018)
Genre: Dom/sub, M/M, Open Relationships, Power Play
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-04
Updated: 2019-11-04
Packaged: 2021-01-23 05:44:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21315145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rillrill/pseuds/rillrill
Summary: You’re not really giving up power if you never had any in the first place. He doesn’t tell Tom that.
Relationships: Greg Hirsch/Tom Wambsgans
Series: bad ones [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1582297
Comments: 23
Kudos: 207





	i'll still destroy you

Greg doesn’t like himself like this.  
  
They’re in D.C.; “they” being himself and Tom, Tom and Greg, nobody’s dream team but an uneasy team nonetheless. They’ve been dispatched to run interference with congressional Republicans, to curry a few favors and grease a few palms with promises of exceptionally fawning coverage and softball questions on the morning panel shows if the powers that be can make this all go away. If Greg could still lay claim to the principles he was once proud to say he had, he wouldn’t be here, but, well. Greg can’t lay claim to a lot of things.

Tom is on edge. It’s evident in everything about him: the way he shifts his weight side to side rather than standing still, drums his fingers on the top of the bar, looks around the room with a weird, wired energy that makes Greg uneasy. When Tom’s like this, there are usually two ways it ends: the ritualistic humiliation of an arbitrarily-chosen third party, or — the other thing. Plan B. Not even Plan B. Plan C and a Half, Plan F.

“Deal,” says the congressman, and Tom smiles, taut, his lips disappearing into a flat line. Greg tugs at his tie.

*

  
  
(The first time, he barely clocked what was happening until it was already over; Tom _accosted_ him, practically, or something like it. Except he didn’t hate it when it was happening, and he didn’t hate it after it happened, either. And getting jerked off by your cousin’s husband in a sauna is the kind of thing that could happen to anyone. They didn’t talk about it afterward. It wasn’t a thing.)

*

  
  
Greg doesn’t like himself like this: sitting, legs spread wide, in a stiff wingback armchair in the penthouse suite of their D.C. hotel, waiting. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands. He settles for twisting the band on his wristwatch. It’s a Swatch. It’s nothing special, but he doesn’t really need a nice watch, right, because he usually just uses his phone to check the time — the watch is an accessory, a nice gesture. The kind of thing adults wear, except he is an adult, has been for a full decade now, and he still feels small.

There’s a soft sound from the floor, from between his legs. Tom’s fidgeting again. Greg swallows.  
  
“Hey,” he says softly, and makes a choice; slides two fingers under Tom’s chin and tips his head up. Tom’s eyes are black, dangerous. Greg swallows hard, hears his throat working in the quiet of the room.  
  
Tom glares up at him, petulant, even on his knees, wearing his boxers and his undershirt with the start of rug burn red and angry on his knees even in the low light. “_Hey_,” he says, mimicking Greg’s hesitance; his tongue flicks over his dry lips. “_Hey. _Wow. The eloquence just drips off you, you know that, Greg? You’re a regular Lord Byron.”

Greg doesn’t know what to say to that. He pushes two of his fingers into Tom’s mouth, instead — Tom lets out a moan, closes his eyes and sucks, lets Greg fuck his mouth with his index and middle finger until Greg feels his fingertips just brush the soft palate, feels Tom start to gag. “_Hey_,” Greg says again, finding something a little meaner inside him. A bravado, kind of. Something he doesn’t normally feel capable of tapping into, not at work, not during regular sex. Tom brings it out of him, this viciousness; Tom, the sheep in wolf’s clothing, has in turn made Greg feel like a wolf himself.  
  
Tom gags again, his eyes tearing up, and Greg removes his fingers, wipes them on Tom’s face.

*  
  
  
(The second time, Greg thought they should talk about it. Turns out, that was a stupid idea.  
  
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tom said. Rebuffed him every step of the way. Because the normal thing to do in situations like this is to pretend it didn’t happen. No real person involved.)

*

  
  
Greg thinks about porn. He thinks about the horrible things he’s watched men do to each other from the comfort of his own bed, often idly, unsatisfactorily, stroking himself in distracted disinterest while he clicks from one video to the next. There are mornings when he’s seen eight different assholes, four different cumshots, before he’s even gotten out of bed. His freshman roommate from college, this guy Ryan Abercrombie, used to brag that he kept a spreadsheet full of all the porn he’d ever nutted to: “Because what if you wanna find it again?” Gross, Greg had thought; now he thinks it’s smart, though maybe the application might be different in his case. He could make a spreadsheet of all the things Tom responds to, the scenes he could crib from. A little academic sexual dishonestly never hurt anybody.  
  
Tom is hard, the dark-red tip of his cock exposed through the slit of his boxers, and he’s grinding down against Greg’s lap. Greg’s desperately hard, too, but he swallows it down and tries not to let it show. Tom doesn’t want him to be desperate — actually, no. Tom wants him to show his desperation more than anything, because it’ll mean he’s winning; and if he lets Tom win, it won’t be fun anymore. Not for either of them. Greg squeezes his eyes shut and grinds his teeth, palming handfuls of Tom’s ass, his solid core, the tree-trunk weight of his back.  
  
“You’re fucking gross,” Greg mutters in his ear, and Tom moans again. “Seriously. You’re — look at you. You’re grinding on my lap like a fucking stripper. Where’s your dignity, man?” They’re lines he’s written and rehearsed, and he fears they’ll come out hollow, but Tom doesn’t clock it. Tom sucks a bruising kiss into Greg’s neck, one that makes him gasp, and he paws at Greg’s cock and Greg knows him well enough to know he means, _Game on_.

*

(“So, your — open thing.”  
  
“Jesus, why do you sound so judgmental? It’s ethical non-monogamy, Greg, not some tawdry affair with a secretary.” Tom looks disgusted, tugging at his black turtleneck, and signals for the check. He makes a show of not looking, just sliding his black AmEx into the sleeve, and Greg can’t help looking around, wondering how everyone else in the room saw him. Saw _them_. Like, the type of game he’d play when he was eating dinner alone, or having a drink while waiting for a friend or a date, looking around the room at all the old-ass men and twenty-something women and trying to suss out, date or daughter?  
  
If the rest of the room was looking at him, at them, at the two of them sitting in the back corner at Jean-Georges, what would they see?  
  
“Your ethical non-monogamy thing, then, yeah.” Greg shrugs. “How’s that, like, going?”  
  
Tom looks up with a Cheshire Cat smile, a smile that makes Greg wonder if it was a misstep to ask. If he’s misread this show of whatever-the-fuck-it-is as something that, maybe, the fuck it isn’t. “Why, Gregory,” he smirks. “How funny you should ask. It’s going terribly.”  
  
“Aha.”  
  
“You, though.” Tom reaches out, but stops short of touching Greg’s hand; he draws lazy spirals instead with one finger on the starched white tablecloth. “You’re always full of surprises.”  
  
Greg digs deep for something surprising to say, but instead, he falls back on their old joke: “Are you trying to seduce me, Tom?” That old saw. A way out, if they need it.  
  
Tom smiles again, low and slow and razor-sharp. Predatory. “Why, yes, Greg. Yes I am.”)

*

  
  
Tom’s back on his knees, back on the floor between Greg’s legs. Tom is kissing, rubbing at Greg’s cock through his slacks, licking a wet spot into the wool, rubbing his face along Greg’s inner thighs. He’s getting more out of it than Greg is, even, which is — “Jesus,” Greg hisses as Tom gets his mouth around the outline of his cock, his face red and his eyes slitted shut.  
  
He screws up his own face; digs deep again. “Yeah. You fuckin’ cockslut, huh? You like that?”  
  
It sounds uncertain, coming out of his mouth, almost like he’s making fun of Tom for wanting this at all, but Tom responds with another whine, slipping his fingertips beneath the waist of Greg’s pants and snapping the elastic waistband of his underwear. An affirmation, if a weird one.

*

  
  
(“I’m just not sure…”  
  
Greg trails off. He’s not sure of a lot of things. He’d rather pause than stammer, he wants to get better at talking, wait for the words to find him than grope around for the right ones mid-sentence. But Tom’s looking at him expectantly, like he’s got something else to say and is waiting for Greg to ask him the right leading question to open the floor. He doesn’t. He waves Tom on, instead, like a driver indicating for a pedestrian to hurry against both parties’ better judgment.  
  
“You need someone to show you what you’re capable of,” Tom fills in after a moment. His crisp blue-striped Oxford is half-unbuttoned, and his suit jacket hung neatly on Greg’s new dining room chair. Greg feels oddly exposed in his own new clothes, the clothes Kendall sent his own personal shopper out with him to buy, rolling his eyes at the stuff Tom had bought for him earlier in the year. They fit, they fit better than the too-tight off-the-rack suits Tom liked him in, but none of it feels good. Not like him. He watches Tom undo the rest of his shirt buttons, and he says nothing, as Tom adds, “You’re a hatchling, Greg. A fuckin’ frozen embryo.”  
  
“Thanks,” Greg says, trying for dry but only getting befuddled. Tom shrugs out of his shirt and drapes it over the chair, over his jacket. His shoulders look good under the thin fabric of his white t-shirt, solid and round. “And you’re… what? What do you get out of this?”  
  
Tom laughs. Tom shakes his head and laughs in a way that doesn’t indicate he found it funny; doesn’t indicate much of anything. “I get what I want.”  
  
“That doesn’t really mean anything.” Greg chews the inside of his cheek.  
  
“Catharsis, Greg.” Tom starts on his belt. “That’s all anything is about. Catharsis and release. _Everything is about sex, except sex, which is about power_... Oscar Wilde.”  
  
“That’s actually not right.” Greg can’t help himself. Knowing the right answer, the fun fact or trivia, that's his comfort zone. “That use of the word ‘sex,’ like, to mean, sex, it’s anachronistic? Wilde never would’ve said that. That line is actually, uh, it can be traced to Robert Michels. Who was kind of a fascist, actually, he worked for Mussolini. It’s actually pretty interesting.”  
  
Tom rolls his eyes. “Jesus. I feel like I just got a golden shower from the Oberlin sociology department.”  
  
“I went to Kenyon,” Greg says, plaintive, “but I think you know that, Tom.”  
  
Tom steps out of his slacks and kicks them away, palming the bulge in his boxers. His belt buckle makes a skittering sound on the white oak floorboards. Greg swallows.)

*  
  
  
  
He thinks about moving to the bed, but it’s dirtier, meaner, to push Tom to the floor. The hotel carpet’s clean, probably; his toes clench in the high pile of the rug.  
  
“There’s a perfectly good bed,” Tom says, his voice pinched, and Greg swallows, tosses off a shrug.  
  
“Yeah, I don’t care.”  
  
“For fuck's sake, Greg, my fucking knees,” Tom whines, and starts to struggle to his feet, and Greg improvises: he gets as much of a grip in Tom’s hair as he can, and he pulls it. Tom gasps, goes agreeably limp and slumps into Greg’s body like a rag doll, which is — Greg’s taken three levels of improv classes, and this is what they’d call a yes-and.  
  
Tom wants to be taken, manhandled; Greg tightens his hand in his hair and drags him, Tom going willingly, across the room, shoves him toward the bed. He stumbles and he catches himself on the mattress, half bent over, and Greg feels something jerk inside him. His back is arched, his forearms are flat and heavy on the plush hotel bedspread; and as if he can feel Greg’s eyes on him, he spreads his legs a little wider and tosses a contemptuous look over his shoulder. As if to say, dare you. As if to say, you _wouldn’t_ dare.  
  
Greg’s fingers shake a little as he unbuckles his own belt.

*

  
  
  
(He doesn’t talk to anyone about this. And the thing is, it’s not like — it’s not _that_ far out of the ordinary, really. It started almost imperceptibly, more in Greg’s head than anywhere else, and who was he going to tell? But then it wasn’t, and then it was and it wasn’t, and it is and it isn’t, all at once.  
  
Eight weeks into this, eight weeks almost to the day after the first time that wasn’t the first time at all, he fiddles around with the age filters on Grindr and picks up a solid-looking man around Tom’s age, maybe a little older. He wonders if he can shock himself out of this — there’s nothing special about Tom, after all — and the hookup is fine, solid, but the guy’s too pushy, somehow, _too_ self-assured. And maybe that’s what it is about Tom: the jittering insecurity, the nervous posturing, the naked desire to both please and be pleased, to impress and be impressed, to see and be seen.  
  
Greg kicks the older guy out, showers off the sweat and lube and puts on some sweatpants. He smokes a bowl and watches half of a movie, then half of another, and he’s scrolling through Seamless when someone bangs, rather loudly and obnoxiously, on his door.  
  
“Oh,” Greg says, as Tom pushes his way inside. “I didn’t know you were coming over.”   
  
“Jesus, check your phone once in a while.” Tom picks it up from the coffee table and flings it in Greg’s direction; Greg catches it with one hand, which feels pretty cool. Three texts and a voicemail, all from Tom, all within the past two hours. Greg drops his phone on the couch beside him, mouths,_ Sorry,_ but Tom ignores him, already taking off his jacket, busying himself at the liquor cabinet.  
  
“What do you want?”  
  
“Wait, are - are you offering me my own booze?”  
  
Tom rolls his eyes. “Technically, Greg, I’m still your fucking boss, and ergo, this is technically my fucking booze. Do you want something?”  
  
“Uh, no,” Greg says. “I’m, uh, I’m fine.”  
  
“Suit yourself.” Tom sloshes more than a couple fingers of scotch into a glass, then downs it without fanfare, like he’s taking a shot of Fireball at a frat party. He leaves the glass on the sideboard, then joins Greg on the couch, leaving no space between them. Greg doesn’t pull away, but he doesn’t lean into it, either. He doesn’t feel so confident here, not with the way Tom is looking at him, like he’s got fifty ideas as to how this will go and is content not to share any of them with Greg himself. _That’s not how it’s supposed to work_, Greg thinks, haplessly. _He’s supposed to ask for what he wants_.  
  
“I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing,” Tom says after a long, quiet moment. Something kicks in the lower third of Greg’s stomach. He doesn’t say anything, just lets Tom stew in the silence. “I mean, fuck it. What’s the point to any of this if you can’t just take what you want?”  
  
Greg starts to say something, but it takes him half a second too long to find the words, and then Tom is kissing him, biting the retort right out of his mouth. Tom kisses hard, teeth and tongue, one hand cupping Greg’s jaw and the other resting on the nape of his neck. It sizzles down Greg’s spine, an electric shock straight to his dick. Tom nips at his lower lip, pushes his tongue back into Greg’s mouth, needy and demanding and direct.  
  
Greg wonders if he’s like this with Shiv; wonders if he’s brave enough to push; he doubts it. The Tom he sees when they’re alone together is unlike any other permutation he’s ever seen.  
  
“If that’s what you want…” Tom feints back, cocks his head, and Greg coughs the rest out, “I’m in charge, right?”  
  
“I don’t know, Greg, _are_ you?”  
  
Greg grinds his teeth, rolls his eyes. “Fuck you. I’m in charge.”  
  
“Yeah, that’s right,” Tom says, sounding low and rough, and the hair on the back of Greg’s neck prickles, his cock responding in time. His mouth is dry and the weed probably didn’t help.  
  
“Yeah,” Greg repeats, turning it over mentally. He sticks one finger into the knot of Tom’s tie, wiggles it just enough to loosen it. “I’m in charge.”)

*

  
  
Tom’s on the bed, on knees and forearms, practically shaking with the effort of holding himself up. His ass is striped with crimson, six imperfect lines that layer over each other at the edges — Greg’s not a _professional_ at this — but it doesn’t seem to matter. The belt’s on the floor, long forgotten now.  
  
“Look at you,” Greg says, harder than he intends. “Is this how you want them to see you?” Tom moans, a visible shudder running through his body, and Greg swallows; that _is_ what Tom wants, probably, except not at all.  
  
He palms Tom’s ass with his other hand, relishes how he gasps when he presses on the fresh bruises. Wonders how he’ll explain this to Shiv. If she’d even notice, or care. He guesses she probably won’t.

*  
  
  
  
(Tom avoids him for a few more days. But he comes back. He always comes back. For what, Greg doesn’t know. If Tom just wanted the weird shit, he could go to a professional; half the men at his level do it, or so Greg’s heard. If all he wanted was to fuck around, to take advantage of the _ethnically non-monogamous arrangement_ he clearly seems to loathe, there are other — less complicated, less risky, less related-to-his-wife options. But that’s not what Tom wants; he says so himself. He never wanted to take the easy way out. He could’ve stayed in Minnesota, gone to law school, been the hotshot lawyer with the catalog-model wife driving his Audi around St. Paul and sent his kids to Blake, but, he tells Greg, over and over, he didn’t _want _that. He wanted to conquer. He wanted the gilded fucking dildo.  
  
This monologue never changes; the beats are unvaried. It doesn’t change the fact that Tom doesn’t kiss him after, doesn’t make eye contact, doesn’t say thank you. It’s one thing to be someone’s dirty secret, Greg thinks, but it’s another to be the person they only fuck to spite themselves.  
  
Greg looks for a way out, a fire alarm to pull, a panic room he can duck into until the storm passes. He comes up dry. He turns it over and over, like a factory-reject Rubik’s cube that can’t be solved: there’s no good answer. It used to be that he didn’t know what Tom wanted, and now he knows exactly what he wants, and he’s no better off. 

Greg pushes, and Tom pulls, and Greg keeps pushing and pushing and pushing, wondering when he’ll give. Tom gets drunk and sloppy and asks for things without being pushed, says things Greg knows he’ll regret if he remembers tomorrow, but he lets it happen anyway and he takes notes. Sex isn’t about power, but Tom is the type of person who thinks it is. And that’s the kind of thing they didn’t teach in management training: how to take the power you’ve been given and manage up. The useful tool, the dull supplicant, however people see him; it’s safer than the alternative, than to be seen as a real player, a threat.  
  
But. _But:_

Tom’s got him on the bed, on his back this time. Tom’s head is between his legs, tongue buried in Greg’s ass, free hand gentle but firm on his balls, and he’s doing this because Greg told him to. His breath was hot with liquor when he kissed Greg at the door, and when Greg offered him coffee, Tom shook the suggestion off, shoved Greg against the nearest wall and kissed him desperate and dizzy. “I don't care,” Tom said, grabbing at him desperately in a way that suggested he cared quite a bit. “Just let me. Greg. _Please_.”

Greg_ likes_ this. The spite, the attention, the adrenaline. And unlike Tom, maybe, he’s not afraid to admit that to himself. He’s not the one in the loveless fucking marriage, slinking around like he’s too afraid to own a single piece of himself that isn’t committee-tested and Logan Roy-approved.  
  
Tom wraps his hand around Greg’s cock; his tongue is wide and broad and relentless, and then he presses a finger in with it and Greg swears wordlessly. _You kiss your wife with that mouth_, Greg wants to say, but he’s got Tom right where he wants him, and he doesn’t want him to stop. He’d be hard-pressed to say that he likes Tom, but he likes him when he’s like this.

He bites the palm of his own hand to stifle his shout when he comes. Tom looks darkly pleased with himself.

Tom wants this from him; he trusts him to do it right. He doesn’t trust Tom as far as he can throw him, but there’s still something about that _look_ of smug, astonished pride when Greg gets it right. _I did this_, the look says. _I created you, in my image. You would be nothing without me_, that takes him to a place that's hard to get to any other way. And Greg takes it all, allows Tom to believe in this version of the story because it's the only one that keeps him happy. Tom, the extraordinary mentor, the mastermind: he thinks he’s Michelangelo with his chisel and rasp, scraping away the faltering pauses and the wrinkled L.L. Bean catalog clothing and the basic human decency to make — whatever this is. Whatever Tom wants.  
  
And the thing is, he knows what Tom wants; he’s gotten so good at anticipating what Tom wants. Tom hates that he wants this, he hates that Greg can give this to him, and Greg loves that, gets a thrill every time he twists that knife. It’s so fucked up and he knows it. It’s so fucked up but he_ likes _it, Tom presenting himself, eager to be the powerless one, eager to let Greg take control, like it’s all part of his C-plus business school master’s thesis on fucking your way to the top of American legacy media — if your marriage is on the rocks, why not fuck an ambitious cousin?  
  
You’re not really giving up power if you never had any in the first place. He doesn’t tell Tom that.)

*  
  
  
  
Greg’s leaning out over the balcony, brand-new Yeezy joggers slung low on his hips, undershirt clinging to his sweaty back. Their suite has a great view of the Capitol, which probably sucks for Tom, what with the recency of his own public, un-erotic humiliation there and all, but that’s not Greg’s problem.  
  
He likes himself more like this, in the aftermath. 

**Author's Note:**

> Nobody asked for this but the idea wouldn't leave me alone. Sorry to these men.


End file.
